f the
highest interest, for it is the oldest building of its kind to be
found north of the Alps.

To reach it you must pass out of the town to the north-west, going by
the Rue Cauchoise where it starts from the Place du Vieux Marche
towards the hill of St. Gervais. All Roman burials took place outside
their walls, and the tombs generally lined the great roads that led
out of the towns. There is no doubt that many such monuments stood on
either hand of the road that you must follow now, beyond the Place
Cauchoise and into the Rue Saint Gervais. Go straight on up the hill
and at the turn into the Rue Chasselievre, upon the left, you will see
an uncompromisingly new Norman church standing alone upon some high
ground. This is a modern building on the site of the old Priory of St.
Gervais, to which William the Conqueror was carried in his last
illness, when he could no longer bear the noise and traffic of the
town. At the west end, on the outside wall of this third and newest
church, is placed a tablet that records his death. Of the second
church you can trace the apse, with its Romanesque pillars and carved
capitals of birds and leaves, beneath the choir at the east end of the
third one.

Look lower still. Beneath the second choir is a still older window
that barely rises high enough above the soil to catch the light at
all. That is the window of the oldest crypt in France. Down thirty
steps from the inner pavement of the new church you can descend with
lighted candles to see the first building in which the Church of Rouen
met. The only accurate drawing that has ever been published of it was
made for these chapters, and it is worth while taxing your patience
with rather more detail than usual in describing a subterranean
chamber that has no parallel save in the Catacombs of Rome. It was no
doubt after his visit to the Holy City in 404 that St. Victrice built
this shrine for the safe-keeping of the first relics of his church in
a pagan land. The friend of St. Martin of Tours, and of St. Ambrose at
Milan, St. Victrice had probably obtained from them the sacred
fragments which were to be so carefully preserved for the
strengthening of the faith among the infidels. But the little
community of Christians at Rouen had its own relics that needed safe
disposal too. For in this crypt on the left hand as you enter is the
tomb of St. Mellon who died in 311, to whom a church is dedicated that
still exists in Monmouthshire, and on th